Wages of Sin (37 page)

Whether it was the caul, though, or his cop instincts, or Fio's bad thoughts at work—but suddenly Rourke didn't want the boy getting in his car.

He ran out into the street, dodging a beer truck, and hollering at the kid to stop, just as the kid punched up the ignition and the Bearcat's engine blew so high it peppered bolts and screws and pieces of metal onto the Saenger Theatre's giant new billboard with its one hundred-times-life-size movie poster of Remy Lelourie.

Rourke could see Fio's mouth moving, but no sound was coming out. Then his ears did that popping thing and he heard the whoop of sirens and horns honking, and the drum of the rain on the Saenger Theatre's marquee. A squad car careened around the corner with a screech of tires. Cops were walking around the mangled Bearcat, crunching glass and scraps of metal underfoot. A woman was sobbing, and Fio was saying, “You got to let go of him, Day.”

“She's dead,” Rourke said. “Bridey's dead.” And it seemed to be the most terrible thing in his life, too terrible to bear.

When he looked down, though, he saw that the body in his arms wasn't a woman, but a boy. The boy was very dead. The top of his head seemed to be missing. Rourke seemed to be sitting on a street curb with his feet in a puddle that he prayed was rain and not blood.

The cop part of Rourke's brain knew that his own body was going into a state of shock. He had to clench his teeth together to keep them from chattering, and his limbs felt numb and floppy, the way they got when you were falling down drunk. His mouth tasted like he'd been sucking on copper pennies.

He knew he was sitting on the curb on Canal Street with the dead newspaper boy in his arms and with his car having just been exploded into scrap metal by some kind of a bomb. He knew that, but time kept segueing to a night last summer when he'd sat on another curb in another street and held in his arms the body of a woman he had loved, who had died by a grenade meant for him.

The Chicago Mafia had killed Bridey Kinsella, but that business had been settled, and he couldn't imagine why they'd be coming back after him now.

“Why is this happening?” he said aloud, asking nobody in particular, except maybe God, who seemed to have gone missing.

Fio squatted on his haunches in front of him. “Day? You got to let go of him. The ambulance is here to take him away.”

“Okay,” he said, but his fingers seemed to be locked in a death grip on the boy's blood-soaked corduroy jacket.

Fio reached down and gently pried his fingers free one by one, then other hands took the boy and carried him way. Rourke pushed up onto his feet, but his legs still weren't working so good and Fio had to grab his arm to steady him. The rain ran out of his hair and into his eyes.

Fio was peering at him from beneath the brim of his battered, shot-up hat. Rourke felt his mouth smile. He knew it was a bad smile, and he tried to stop it but he couldn't. “It was me all along. I got you shot at, partner. I'm sorry.”

“'S okay. Day, why don't we—”

“So maybe you shouldn't get too close to me for a while, huh? I'm lethal to people who get close to me.”

Fio's smile wasn't a very good one either. “You need to go to the hospital?” he said. “You look kinda wobbly there.”

Rourke shook his head; it felt as if he had water sloshing around in there. “I'm all right.”

“Maybe we should go back to the squad room. Put our feet up and talk this through, figure out who's doing this. We're gonna need to file a report anyway, and the captain, he's gonna want to chew some on our asses.”

Rourke shook his head, and the water sloshed again. “You go on, Fio. I got a funeral I got to go to.”

“Aw, man…”

Rourke was aware that his partner was giving him that craggy-faced worried look, and so he tried to act as normal as possible. He straightened his jacket and dusted off his pants. He looked for his hat and found it on the sidewalk, next to a fire hydrant. He put it on, then he looked around for his car, and then he remembered that the 'Cat was dead, and so he started walking.

Fio borrowed a squad car and picked Rourke up before he'd gone two blocks, which was a good thing since he couldn't feel his legs all that well and the water was still sloshing around in his head.

The Girod Street Cemetery was often where you ended up if you died poor and Protestant. A tenement for the dead. Over two thousand vaults had been dug out of the cemetery's whitewashed brick walls, stacked one above the other like ovens in a bakery, and the wooden coffins were sealed up inside them.

By the time Fio parked the squad car across the corner from the cemetery, the wooden coffin that contained the earthly remains of Titus Dupre had already been slipped into its oven and the door bolted shut. The band had tightened up the snares on their drums, they'd pulled the slide out on their trombones and lifted their trumpets to their lips, and swung into “Didn't He Ramble.”

The mourners followed the band, dancing through the scrolled gate, their umbrellas bobbing to the beat, and sending Titus Dupre's soul off to glory and Jesus.

Rourke got out and stood by the squad car until Cornelius Dupre saw him. For a moment the boy looked set to keep on dancing, but then he stopped, rigid and vibrating in his rage, letting the parade pass him by and waiting for Rourke to come to him.

Rourke took the boy by the upper arm and led him over to the dubious shelter of the cemetery's crumbling whitewashed walls. Cornelius didn't drag his feet, but he wasn't bothering either to hide the hate in his eyes.

Rourke looked back toward the squad car idling at the corner with Fio at the wheel. He caught Fio's eye, telling him with a shake of his head that he could stay where he was.

“I want to talk with you,” he said to the boy.

Cornelius smiled a wide, phony smile. His teeth were pure white in the ebony of his face. Raindrops sparkled in his long matted hair. “Where you been at, Mr. Po-liceman? You been busy this mornin' killing somebody else's brother?”

Rourke looked down at his chest because that was where Cornelius Dupre was looking. Blood caked the whole front of his gray flannel suit and white shirt, and for a moment he couldn't imagine where it all had come from, and then he remembered that he'd lifted the boy's body out of the car.

Cornelius made an uh-huh sound in the back of his throat. “So what you goin' to say to me? That you fried the wrong nigger and now you're sorry. Lord, my brother never so much as kicked a dog in his life, but that didn't stop the white law from takin' care of bidness as usual.”

“Don't,” Rourke said.

The funeral had drawn a crowd of curiosity seekers and a big part of that crowd was white. They were hanging around outside the grilled doors of a neighborhood speakeasy and they were starting to shuffle their feet and murmur among themselves as Cornelius's angry words carried to them on the heavy, rain-sodden air. Already letters to the editor had shown up in the morning newspapers, pointing out that Mary Lou Trescher had been strangled with a chimney sweep's weighted rope. Saying that white girls were being “preyed” on by black boys, and that the police ought to be taking a long, hard look at Titus Dupre's little brother.

Cornelius, though, either wasn't listening or was beyond caring. “A negro's wife is a white man's jelly roll, and nobody gives a hoot,” he said, raising his voice even louder. “But Lord help the nigger who dares to turn it 'round back on the white man. What it's all about, what it's only
ever
been about, is the white man protecting his white woman from the big bad black buck.”

“Shut up.” Rourke grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and slammed him up against the cemetery wall, hard enough to make the crowd think he was rousting the kid, so that they'd lay off him later, once he and Fio were gone.

He held the boy up against the wall a moment longer, then let him down slowly. “Just…shut up with that,” he said, gentle now. “Before you give your gran'mon something else to cry about.”

The boy glared hate and fury at him a moment longer, then his gaze went to the restless crowd of white men in front of the speakeasy and all the air seemed to leave him.

“Your brother got framed for the murder of those girls,” Rourke said. “I want you to tell me how you think that happened.”

“You the detective, so what you askin' me for?”

“Because I don't believe it was just bad luck.”

Cornelius stared at Rourke, his mouth and the skin around his eyes trembling, then he nodded. “If you hired my brother, Titus, to clean your chimley, you got your money's worth. He played a mean fiddle and he could whip any man alive at dominoes, but he liked his glass or two of white lightnin' on a Saturday night, liked to brag on himself, too, when he had a snootful. And, man, that boy believed that he was some
special
nigger.”

Tears were mixing with the rain on the boy's face, but Rourke doubted he even knew that he was crying. “He believed,” Cornelius said, his voice breaking, “that havin' a white girl in his bed made him less colored. The fool.”

“Ah, Christ,” Rourke said.

So Titus Dupre really had been with the Bloom girl the evening she'd disappeared, but there'd been no rape, no tease and rejection. She'd gone to him willingly. Only when the boy got liquored up, he liked to brag about his exploits in the Negro smoke joints. He just had to talk about the sweet loving he had gotten from a white girl, and that was what had made it so easy for the real killer of both girls to frame him.

“They were lovers,” Rourke said. “Your brother and Mercedes Bloom were lovers.”

Cornelius shook his head. “Man, you still don't know nothin', do you? It wasn't her, it was that other one. It was that Duboche bitch from the starting. And he wasn't fuckin' her, it was the other way around—she was fuckin' him. Only it don't make a straw's bit of difference anyways, he would've still hung for what he was doin'—a nigger puttin' it to white pussy, even if she'd been beg-gin' for it.”

“Jesus. Why in hell have you all waited so long to tell me this?” Anger surged through Rourke with such force he wanted to put his fist through the crumbling wall. Then right on the heels of the anger came a sadness. He despaired at times that he was never going to understand human nature. “Your brother sat in that courtroom and heard himself called her rapist, all those months afterward sitting in that cell, waiting to die, and he never once said he was innocent.”

Cornelius's laugh was like the noise of a hickory stick breaking. “Innocent's a word for the white man. Ain't you heard? We were born in sin. Uppity niggers like my brother get lynched all the time just for looking at a white woman. If you think the truth woulda set him free, you a fool.”

He was a fool. The chimney sweep's rope, the girls' hats under his bed, his bragging down at the local tonk—Titus Dupre would have been arrested anyway, and no amount of proof that Nina Duboche had been a willing partner in his bed would have calmed the irrational fears of the jury's twelve white men that their own women weren't safe.

Rourke had been staring at the ground while he thought, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched against the rain, but now he raised his head and faced the pinched angry light in Cornelius Dupre's eyes.

“I should have seen it, though,” Rourke said. “I'm—”

“Don't,” the boy said, snarling the word. “Don't you tell me you're sorry for what you all done to my brother. You can leave me and him both a little pride by not tellin' us you're sorry.”

Rourke nodded, saying nothing more.

“And I'll tell you something else, too, Mr. Po-liceman. Nina Duboche was a bitch, but my fool of a brother loved her. He knew what the world would think of a white girl who'd been with a Negro. He figured he was going down for it no matter what, and she might've been dead, but he still had a care for her.”

A wind kicked up, driving the rain and carrying the smell of mud from the river and of rotting husks from the cemetery's pecan trees. The parade of mourners was long gone, the crowd around the speakeasy was dwindling. Fio had gotten out of the car and was trying to light a Castle Morro without much help from the wind and rain.

“Your brother paid for a crime he didn't own,” Rourke said to Cornelius Dupre, “while the man who does own it is still out there, still killing. If I stop him it won't be an apology, it'll be evening up the score.”

The boy cuffed the tears and rain off his face with the back of his hand. “Why? So's you can sleep at night? Why should I care, if he does more? He's killin' white girls. I hope he goes on killin' y'all till they none of you left.”

Chapter Twenty-four

R
emy Lelourie used her little finger to rub the lipstick off her fangs. “My lord, at this rate the sun'll be coming up on a new day before we get there,” she said, as the Peerless touring car rolled forward a couple more feet and then stopped. “And we all know what the sun does to vampire bats.”

She looked over at Rourke to see if he was smiling at her little joke, but she might as well have been talking to herself. The car rolled forward another couple of feet and stopped again.

They were following along behind a parade of floats and marching bands, and as soon as the parade passed by the Saenger Theatre, Remy Lelourie's car was supposed to pull up out front, and she would make her grand entrance down the red carpet. Canal Street was jam-packed with spectators, many in costume themselves even through they wouldn't be going to the party. People in New Orleans loved playing dress-ups, though, and parades were practically a religion.

Remy sucked on her bat teeth and then wiggled them with her tongue—they were driving her crazy. They'd been fashioned out of celluloid to fit over her own teeth, but they kept scraping the inside of her cheeks and lips. She'd forgotten how much they'd done that all during the filming of
Lost Souls
last winter. By the wrap party the whole inside of her mouth had been raw.

Along with the fangs, she was wearing the tattered white shroud and black winglike cape that she'd been buried in in
Lost Souls.
The Saenger Theatre people had wanted her escort to be a complementary vampire bat, but nothing was going to get Daman Rourke into a costume of any sort, not even the promise of sex with a sex goddess. He was looking good, though, in tails and white tie and a topper.